It was a bit surprising to me, but I recently realized that I have been using Final Cut Pro for 10 years as of Fall 2010. I can see no better time to take a personal look back a this software that has been so influential on my life as well as an entire industry.
Final Cut Pro 1.0 My first exposure to Final Cut Pro was during my senior year in high school, back in 2000. The previous semester, the school had begun a Digital Media class and Final Cut Pro was the key component. I signed up for the class as one of my many "slack-off" electives. We were shooting with Canon GL-2's and Sony VX-1000s and learning the basics of logging and capturing. I actually didn't spend too much time with FCP1.0 because the school uprgraded to 2.0 mid semester. One funny memory about 1.0 is that the Dither Dissolve transition would cause the program to crash instantly. It was fun to tell unexpecting classmates "Dude, check out the Dither Dissolve, its awesome!"
Final Cut Pro 2.0 This was the version where I really began to understand editing. I made a whole lot of bad films my senior year in highschool but with each one, I understood what I was doing a little bit more. I remember one project where we had to use at least 3 layers and some effects. My piece had 5 layers and at least two effects on each. One minute of DV footage took over 5 hours to render on our dual processor G4's (still on OS9). Now we can edit full HD on a laptop. It was also around this time, when our teacher had the OSX beta on one of the computers and when I decided that Macs weren't all that bad after all.
Final Cut Pro 3.0 Version 3.0 was the first Final Cut Pro that I owned. In community college I decided that I really did enjoy filmmaking and decided to buy the student version so I could experiment with my own projects. I also enrolled in an adult-education class in video production to continue my learning. It was around this time that I decided I wanted to go to film school. My knowledge of Final Cut Pro gave me a good head start at Brooks Institute of Photography. Final Cut 3.0 was the first version to include Cinema Tools which allowed for film workflows. I used this tool with the telecine material after some 16mm projects. I also saw Walter Murch speak about editing Cold Mountain using Final Cut Pro 3.0 at the LAFCPUG.
Final Cut Pro 4.0 and Final Cut Pro HD (4.5) This was a marginal update for me and I didn't use it very much. I do remember that that changed the user interface in a little bit strange way. The free update to 4.5 added DVCPROHD editing capabilities, which by todays standards, is hardly HD. It was a good step forward in HD editing though. I wasn't editing any HD projects at this point in time however.
Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Pro 5.0 I was going to graduate from Brooks Institute very soon, so when Final Cut Studio came out, I took advantage of my student discount and bought it. Final Cut Studio was the first time they marketed a suite of software, the most notable addition being Motion 1.0. I saw a early preview of Motion at a LAFCPUG meeting and was impressed. I still think it is a great program, if not as fully capable as After Effects. I used this version of Final Cut Pro longer than any other version. My documentary H.R. Giger's Sanctuary was cut with it. The biggest feature in verson 5, in my opinion, was the ability to edit HDV footage natively. Which made working with cameras like the Sony Z1. Anyone who used this version dreaded the final render of a HDV project and the "Conforming Video" progress bar -- it was damn slow.
Final Cut Studio 2 and Final Cut Pro 6 Color was the big product addition to the Final Cut Pro suite, however the biggest upgrade, and probably the most important in FCP history was the introduction of ProRes 422. This "visually lossless", variable bit-rate codec allowed for editing full HD, raster video with the file size of uncompressed SD. The codec has had such an impact that AVID now supports it and the ARRI Alexa has the ability to shoot directly to this format. I use ProRes422 video every day.
Final Cut Pro 7 In this version, for some reason, Apple reset the name back to Final Cut Studio (it should be Final Cut Studio 3). Anyway, after suffering with FCP 5 at home for too long, I decided to buy FCP 7 for myself. Using ProRes at jobs made me really want that capability at home. I am glad I waited for version 7 though because Apple dropped the price significantly on this verson. None of the new features excited me too much, though the inclusion of new flavors of ProRes were quite nice. I use ProRes422(LT) all the time for VDSLR footage since their bitrate is lower than that anyway.
I am looking forward to whatever Jaw-dropping news Apple has coming this year. I am hoping for something big. We'll see.
I was recently compelled to recreate a famous Man Ray image after taking a picture of the Sternwarte in Zürich. Sternwartezeit
Man Ray was an American photography who earned his fame amongst the surrealists of Paris. He is also my favorite photographer. Let me share one of my favorite anecdotes about him:
One day Tristan Tzara came over to Man Ray's studio in Paris and presented him with a flyer for an upcoming Dada event. The flyer said the event would feature a film by Man Ray. Man Ray thought that was a very nice joke because Tzara knew very well that Man Ray had not made a film. Tzara was serious however. He suggested that Man Ray make a camera-less film in the style of his Rayographs. Man Ray thought this was plausible, so he acquired some 35mm cinema film and took it into his darkroom. Cutting it into strips, he laid it out onto a table and proceeded to sprinkle salt and pepper on some parts, toss thumb tacks onto others and various other things. He then developed the strips and spliced them together with some loose-ends of some other cinema film he had been experimenting with. When the filmed was shown at the event, it caused an argument in the audience as to its merits as art. This argument lead to a brawl that the police had to break up.
It is amazing what was so controversial in the past that it caused a fight. I attribute it to the cognitive dissonance of the new. When people are exposed to something they have never seen, or imagined before sometimes the brain can't handle it. I strive to create something like that.
With all the buzz about the iPhone4's video capabilities, I thought it would be appropriate to tell a story from the archive. This is a story of the harsh mistress that is internet fame and of pushing technologies beyond the cutting edge. It is also a story of self-congratulatory exaggeration. It is the true story of the first music video shot entirely on a camera phone:
Set your judgement aside and come with me way back to 2004.
(Ripple dissolve - Chimes sound effect )
Random Nokia 3650 PhotoCamera phones were first becoming popular in the US, and I had recently picked up a Nokia 3650. This shining piece of technology had a 0.31 megapixel camera that also recorded 176x144 video, though limited to 12 second or 96kb clips (whichever came first). In addition, I was equipped with an unlimited GPRS plan from T-Mobile and an account with the now defunct proto-twitter service Textamerica. I was posting photos and short messages regularly from my phone way back in the early mid-2000s. I was a true member of the avant garde. Little did I know that my penchant for pushing the envelope would catapult me quite nearly to internet celebrity.
The night was February 30th, 2004. I was visiting San Diego for the weekend. It was late, so a group of friends and I were at the only place to go in track-home-laden North County San Diego -- Denny's. As it got later, we all became slightly punchy. My friend Haber (known only by his last name) was punchier than most and I began to film him with my camera phone. I discovered that you could stop and start within a clip, which allowed for basic in-camera effects like making things disappear. At one point in a video clip, my other friend Dave told Haber to get down from something he had climbed on to. That line was born to be a sound sample.
Later that night I returned to Haber's place, where I was couch surfing. I got the idea to throw together some loops in Garage Band and edit the grainy clips into a "music video". Haber, who is one hell of a guitar player, added the pièce de résistance -- a kick ass guitar solo. I inserted an MTV-style music video title and named the "band" XFYA, since everyone at Denny's that night had been in my high-school band, FYA (like ex-FYA, get it?). I hastily uploaded the video to Textamerica (Archive.org Link), giving it the title "the first music video shot entirely on a nokia 3650", and promptly went to sleep. The next morning, Haber Get Down had been seen nearly 10,000 times. It spread like a small brush fire through the nascent Web2.0 and went on to be viewed nearly 200,000 times (which was a lot for back then). It was even written about by several prominent bloggers including BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin who wrote "It's kind of lame, but it's still a first."
Filming "Cornelius Swarthout"To continue riding this wave of internet celebrity, we made an attempt to shoot a planned music video on my camera phone. We recorded a few songs the next night and filmed the second music video shot entirely on a camera phone: Homage to Cornelius Swarthout.
Alas, I was too far ahead of my time. Youtube didn't exist yet and web videos didn't have as much ability to go viral. Some TV shows appeared interested, but the video had too little resolution and television didn't really "get" internet video yet. (I actually sent a a mini-DV of this to a cable channel! Imagine 176x144 badly encoded video blown up to 720x480. Yuck!) Haber Get Down was forgotten. Over a year later, the Presidents of the United States of America claimed that they were the first to film a music video with cell phones on their song Some Postman. XFYA, being essentially a fake band, had no chance at refuting this. I still stand by my acheivement though. Granted, their video may have been better -- but we were first.
Ok, setting this silliness aside, something did strike me during that time. It was something people are only starting to talk about now. When we were filming Homage to Cornelius Swarthout, I thought about how liberating it was to be able to make a film with a pocketable device. I thought to myself that some years in the future we would have HD video camera phones, and the boundries of where and when cinematic stories could be created would be broken down.
We are seeing this now. When the iPhone 3GS came out, I made another music video, which was the first ever to be to be shot on that device -- Technologic Overkill. It was sort of an inside joke to myself about Haber Get Down (Technologic Overkill was the name of my moblog on Textamerica). Other videos came shortly after (1, 2, 3). Now with the iPhone 4, people are creating and even editing HD videos from a device that fits in their pocket. The results are pretty good (1, 2, 3).
Back in 2004 again. I had another thought that day while filming my second camera phone project. More important than where and when videos could be created with a pocketable device was who would do it. In the future, any kid with a camera phone could create the next masterpiece of cinema. I know Haber Get Down is far from a masterpiece, but I think it was an interesting step towards the future -- or it could just be a blurry camera phone video.
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